WASHINGTON — (CNN) Democrats on Monday pre-empted the upcoming release of a Republican-led House Select Committee report on Benghazi by issuing their own version of a probe into the 2012 terror attack that killed four Americans on Hillary Clinton’s watch as secretary of state.
The move by Democrats on the panel was designed to debunk the conclusions of the committee’s majority report that is expected to be highly critical of Clinton.
“We have been hampered in our work by the ongoing Republican obsession with conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality,” said the Democratic report, which underscored the fierce political divisions between Republicans and Democrats over the attack on a U.S. consular post and a CIA annex in the Libyan port city.
“Rather than reject these conspiracy theories in the absence of evidence — or in the face of hard facts — Select Committee Republicans embraced them and turned them into a political crusade.”
“We hope our report will put to rest the conspiracy theories about Benghazi once and for all and return the focus to where it belongs—on the goal of improving the security of Americans serving abroad,” the report continued.
The Democratic report argues that the Pentagon could not have done anything on the night of the attacks in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, that would have saved the lives of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
It concludes that State Department security measures in Benghazi were “woefully inadequate” but that Clinton never personally denied any requests for additional security in Benghazi.
It denies the Intelligence Community was influenced by politics in its response to the attacks and that its evolving explanations on its causes were the result of evolving information in fast changing circumstances not meddling by administration officials.
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